1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to the oil and gas industry, particularly reservoir management, and more particularly to methods, apparatus, systems, and program code for managing an intelligent field.
2. Description of the Related Art
Advances in technology continue to have a great impact on the petroleum industry. Within the past 20 years, many technologies have transformed the way oil and gas companies manage and/or optimize their operations. One such technology includes permanent downhole monitoring systems (PDHMS), which were introduced over 20 years ago. A PDHMS surface unit typically is used to collect subsurface sensor performance data, i.e., pressure and temperature gauges. Other technologies include, for example, multiphase flow meters (MPFMs) which provide individual flow rates for oil, gas, and water in a producing well, wellhead pressure and temperature (WHP/T) measurement devices which provide measured wellhead pressure and temperature, tubing/casing annulus (TCA) pressure measuring devices, and electrical submersible pump (ESP) devices for assisting the oil to the surface, which provide measurable electrical and pump parameters.
Early installations were often in the form of self-contained devices having removable modules. Some more conventional configurations include wire or fiber-optic connection, which communicate the data to surface-based units. Others include a network topography which provides such data between the various sensors and the surface-based units.
Initial methodologies of transferring the data received by the surface-based units to a central computer or monitoring station included use of physical transport and/or transmission over land-based wire lines. More recent technologies employed by the assignee of the respective invention or inventions include utilization of radiowave well data monitoring which can include individual well transmitters that transmit to a remote terminal unit (RTU) that sends the data by UHF radio to an information server or SCADA system, which can then migrate the data over a local communication network to desktops of production engineers. An exemplary system is described, for example, in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 12/547,295, titled: “Intelligent Field Oil and Gas Field Data Acquisition, Delivery, Control, and Retention Based Apparatus, Program Product and Related Methods,” incorporated by reference in its entirety. Similar technologies include utilization of global satellite mobile or cellular telephone based communication, which have generally been employed as a backup to provide alerts. Such technologies of remote monitoring of field data can provide the wellhead pressure, wellhead temperature, downhole pressure, downhole temperature, annuli pressures, fluid flow rate for individual fluid phases, and electrical submersible pump data, both in real-time and on demand, to allow centralized well control.
The field data, however, can be unreliable, e.g., outside the boundaries of valid data. The field data can also be invalid, e.g., within the boundaries of valid data but substantially deviating from expected data values based on given conditions. The field data can also be incomplete, e.g., missing data.